So we are supposed to accept that anyone on the up and up should be tracked and indexed by Google? Are we supposed to look at it as seedy when it helps people organize and communicate in oppressive regimes?

Home of the Whopper.

Most are rather dumb. They will encrypt standard file types such as jpg and doc, but leave really critical stuff (qbw, pst, etc) alone. I guess the writers, not knowing what files being encrypted in a user profile might brick a machine only go for easy targets. They will readily encrypt any attached drive as well, following the same ruleset. If your backup program stores in a standard .zip or in the clear, it will be encrypted too. The best safety net is an online backup that does versioning so you can roll back to pre-infection versions of files.

One last note, in about 5%-10% of the cases I have worked on, I was able to recover files from VSS. Most of these variants attempt to disable VSS and delete the shadow copies, but they either are not successful or do it slowly. Yanking the drive from the running environment and looking at it with shadow explorer on a clean box can sometimes save some data. Here in the US Cryptorbit variants seem to be the most frequent I see (cryptodefense, cryptolocker, howdecrypt, etc). They have really exploded in the past month. A recent fake ADP email that was making it through spam filters was responsible for a lot. The linked site downloaded a zip containing an exe with an adobe pdf icon. If you have a suspect exe, see if it has been analyzed n malwr.com and you can get a good breakdown of its precise behavior.

I came here looking for -intelligent- laser jokes. Perhaps involving some sort of conspiracy/tinfoil hattery. I am sorely disappointed.

My Uncle has a country place that no one knows about / he says it used to be a farm, before the motor law.......

No, but post prime actors and directors do. So do Hollywood execs. Hell Get JJ. Abrams on board and add a bunch of lens flare.

The taxpayer.. for all of it. The beatings, the reports, the politicians and bureaucrats dickering over minutia.
Who doesn't pay? Those responsible for such atrocities. We increasingly live in a society where a few - IE military and intelligence brass, the rich, the police, and corporations and individuals with the money to play the game can do nearly anything with impunity.

This meets the definition of tyranny - arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power - and we live it every day, but most do not see it. The question is, is the natural state of being for humans - people abusing their power over others, or can it be changed and transcended?

Vaporware, from a company called "Steam", don't you remember Half Life 3? They will certainly deliver!

I never thought I would hear 'directly connected to internet AND more secure' in the same sentence. Is it April fools?

I never had access to a Sinclair. I did own a Mattel aquarius, but did not have the controllers and games. All I did was try to program in the (16 or 64) whatever it had memory in BASIC. Learned quite a bit then. Primarily that while I can program (some) it is not my forte. I am a hardware geek at heart.

The puns in this post are a SYN.

Questionable or untraceable != wasteful. It is anloos way of making things sou d worse than they likely are. Specific numbers are much less. Let's throw the FUD around boys.

I wonder how this stacks up against waste in huge projects at Boeing or blackwater? The waste is bad but no surprise and seems to be a very small percentage. I wonder how much pressure to generate bad press has been applied by vested interests who do not want data like that made available?

His goal is not the exact opposite. It is to spin yams to make us trust that the backdoors are necessary AND actually enhance our privacy.

Not only this, but presumably the pits can be under the glass, just as they are under polycarbonate on a disc. Then the pits are not exposed to dir, and a normal washing will remove surface dust, bird poop, etc.